Senior Penetration Engineer — AI‑Driven Cloud Security

Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 129,000 - 209,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Staff Penetration Testing Engineer to conduct comprehensive penetration tests and lead assumed-breach red team operations across cloud-native applications and large-scale infrastructure.

You will leverage AI-assisted testing frameworks, mentor junior team members, and provide expert security guidance to engineering teams to strengthen defenses against evolving cyber threats.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree with 3+ years (Master's) or 5+ years (Bachelor's) in penetration testing, offensive security, or related field.
• Proven experience conducting penetration tests across cloud-native apps and large-scale infra.
• Ability to plan and lead assumed-breach red team operations including lateral movement and privilege escalation.
• Strong proficiency in identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in cloud services and container platforms.
• Experience developing custom tooling/scripts to automate security testing.

Responsibilities

• Conduct comprehensive penetration tests across cloud-native apps, large-scale infrastructure, and complex networks.
• Execute multi-tenant isolation testing and segmentation validation.
• Identify, exploit, and document vulnerabilities in cloud services, containers, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Plan and lead red team operations to test defensive controls.
• Integrate AI-assisted testing frameworks into penetration testing workflows.
• Provide security guidance to SRE/Engineering during remediation and secure design.

Skills

Penetration testing

Cloud security

Red team operations

AI-assisted testing

Vulnerability assessment

Reporting & communication

Mentoring

Automation tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree (related field)

Master's degree (related field)

Tools

Python scripting

LLM automation

Security tooling

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is seeking a Senior Staff Penetration Testing Engineer to conduct comprehensive penetration tests and lead assumed-breach red team operations across cloud-native applications and large-scale infrastructure.

You will leverage AI-assisted testing frameworks, mentor junior team members, and provide expert security guidance to engineering teams to strengthen defenses against evolving cyber threats.